


a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood

by timeforgetsyou



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, Gen, Light Angst, get a little pretentious and write some weird prose about a video game character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-30
Updated: 2015-01-30
Packaged: 2018-03-09 16:06:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3256082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timeforgetsyou/pseuds/timeforgetsyou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>solas collects his thoughts after leaving</p>
            </blockquote>





	a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood

**Author's Note:**

> I have been writing a lot of dialogue and loose narrative lately, so I wanted to do a little something to stretch my fingers. I dunno. basically if you're looking for someone to get too heady and analytic about a video game character, i'm ur girl

"What am I doing  
with a lung full of dust  
and a tongue of wood,  
Knee-deep in the cold  
swamped by flowers?"  
sylvia plath, leaving early

* * *

 

 

Take a moment to collect yourself. Count the seconds in between moments. Listen to the waves in the shell you hold to your ear. You carry oceans in your heart.

 

_five_

When he fell out of his sleep, the world had been new again. New again as though he could remember how he had seen it in the first place. He remembered echoes -- the memory of colours (greens, browns, ambers) but now the winter wind bites, it feels sharp in his lungs like glass.

It took him a while to recognize his weight. His legs were stiff, he kept to himself, forgot to be alive and present. People expected him to speak with a voice almost lost to him -- the lilt, the way his mouth curved around words, the feel of his tongue in his mouth.

What is he supposed to say?

 _It doesn’t matter_ , he reminds himself when he feels too grounded. This is not why you are here; you are here to right a wrong (but he can’t help it when he catches out of the corner of his eye -- first the green light of the anchor, not green like he used to know or green like she breathes, but green like what isn’t supposed to be here -- then her hand, the way it curls around her staff, the dirt underneath her fingernails (the dirt like the green like she breathes)) _this is not why you are here_.

He’d been asleep for too long, and the loss hadn’t hurt then. Not really. The echoes of pain, the pain of others, but not his own. Now, though? Now he doesn’t feel muffled, stifled, like he’s been underwater for too long, blood rushing in his ears. It’s an unusual freedom, the freedom to hurt so acutely, the pangs of his failure.

The corners of his mouth turn reluctantly upwards, a rebellious smile, an ironic reflex.

There was a time he didn’t have to tell these half-truths, didn’t have to be more than what he was, didn’t have to be two people at once.

(never trust half an elf)

 

_four_

Now he’s the one anchored. “I used to be so scared,” she had said to him. “The weight of the world on my shoulders. But if it means having you? That makes it okay. I’m okay. I’m not great, but I’m okay, and I wouldn’t have it any different.”

She held him here, made him solid, more real. And he held his tongue.

He should know better than this – he’s older than his face betrays. He’s seen the echoes of kingdoms rise and fall for eons but gets done in by a girl, a child who marks her face for reasons she thinks she understands, who clings to echoes of old ways. He clings to the echoes of old ways. He’s bursting at the seams with the echoes of old ways, watching girls fall in love with dangerous men.

“Whatever happens, we’ll do it together,” she had smiled at him. Earnest and optimistic to a fault.

 

_three_

“I could hardly abandon you now.” 

 _Now_.

The word escapes before he can catch in his hands; it falls and hits the ground, burrowing into the earth to root itself.

There is no if/then. It is an imperative and it will come from your bones and settle in your ribcage until the weight of it exhausts you.

_I will leave you._

 

_two_

He is ever chasing the right thing. A penchant for believing things will work out in the end against better judgment.

People had come and gone without so much as a batted eyelash -- only ever tie yourself to things that endure, never something so quick as she is, shemlen though she would deny it.

And yet he stands at the edge of the grove but refuses to go any further like a foolhardy child.

Look up at the sky: dark velvet and netted with stars, cradling the sliver of a moon in its folds, nothing more than a whisper. Waxing, waning, but steadfast.

Grow. Do not change.

 

_one_

You shouldn’t, but you do.

She dreams of running after the aravel, her feet covered in dust and dirt, laughing with the other children. The girls would bring her wilted flowers plucked from long forgotten gardens and she would make them bloom again in the palm of her hand. They would shriek with glee, and she would carefully place them in the knots and braids of their hair.

“Da’len, the gift is no party trick,” her keeper would warn, but there had been no malice behind his eyes. He was warm, like a father to her, teaching her the old ways, how to bend the veil like the People before her. He holds her hands in his own, showing her how to make lightning dance between her fingertips.

And then you will not wake in cold sweats, you will not gasp. It is nothing so dramatic. Either asleep or not asleep, nothing in between but waking in an instant, eyelids heavy, shoulders aching, the smell of sandalwood and leather and lavender just out of reach.

Dream of her childhood, if that will ease the pain. The aravel, her clan, watching the halla and the rhythm of their hooves. Everything before you. Remember her this way: bright-eyed and red-cheeked, untouched and quiet. She is lighter when she does not have to carry the world on her back.

Pull a strand of her hair from the sleeve of your coat and watch it dance away in the wind.  

 

breathe.

in.

out.

good.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading xx


End file.
